Western Digital takes an innovative approach to networking with its LiveWire kit

Rating

Price

Pros

Cons

Speed limited to 200Mbps

no mains passthrough

LiveWire review

Most Powerline kits are very similar, but Western Digital’s LiveWire stands out from the crowd in a number of ways.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the two adaptors in the kit don’t simply look like fat electrical plugs, as all their rivals do. Instead, each adaptor is housed in a little rectangular black box – a bit like a small hard disk – and comes with a separate extension cable for plugging it into the mains.

This gives you a bit more freedom to position the adaptors, as you don’t need to plug them directly into a mains socket.

Each adaptor also has no less than four separate Ethernet sockets, so you can plug in a whole selection of computers, games consoles, and other devices. The data transfer speed is just 200Mbps, but that’s fine for most ordinary home and office users (we still have older adaptors that run at 85Mbps!).

Western Digital takes an innovative approach to networking with its LiveWire kit